Recontextualizing Your Own Work: Flying Club Cup Videos

Posted By Foolish Sage on February 23, 2009

This entry is part of a series, Flying Club Cup Videos by Beirut»

Beirut (Creator/songwriter Zach Condon & band) is an intriguing fusion of indie/pop sensibilities with European folk traditions. Condon’s first album, 2006′s Gulag Orkestar, was heavily influence by Balkan and gypsy traditions. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Eastern European folk music even since I spent a summer in Hungary, so this music had instant appeal.

Condon and his friends released their second full-length project, The Flying Club Cup, this past October. For this new album, Beirut moves a bit west to explore the languid, boozy dreamscape of French cafe society.

beirut_nantes Fans of Sufjan Stevens will latch on to Beirut very easily. Like Stevens, Condon employs a multitude of instruments not ordinarily heard on a pop album. Accordions and oom-pah brass are front and center most of the time, but very little guitar. The band for the latest album (nearly identical to Condon’s touring band for the past year) adds a violin, string bass, zylophone, ukuleles, a bazouki, and many other instruments.

But the most important instrument on any Beirut song is Zach Condon’s voice. Though just 22 years old (he was 19 when he began the first Beirut album), Condon sounds like someone who’s lived a full life of heartache and joy, singing about it in a smoky cabaret on a back street of Paris, fortified by one too many drinks. His voice trembles with emotion as he slurs words into each other. This sometimes renders his lyrics incomprehensible, but the style works with the songs.

In support of the album, Beirut assembled in Brooklyn and filmed a video version of every song on Flying Club Cup over the space of three days last September. The videos were shot with a single hand-held camera that becomes a character in the videos, wandering around inside the band like a drunken tourist who’s mistakenly wandered on stage.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to post each of the videos with my commentary. If you can’t wait and want to see them all, they are posted on the album’s official web site: http://flyingclubcup.com.

The out-of-context contextuality comes in through the transfer of Condon’s songs to video. He transports us from the world of French cabaret to contemporary Brooklyn, and Brooklyn becomes a whole new world inside Condon’s head in the process.

The first video is for the song “Nantes.” (According to interviews with Zach Concon, each of the songs on the album evokes a city or region of France.)

This video acts as the perfect introduction to the concept of the whole series: Zach wandering around Brooklyn and “finding” his band in unusual places. In this first video, he descends the stairwell of an abandoned warehouse, picking up more band members on each landing, who add their parts to the song. As does Sufjan Stevens in many of his songs, Condon tends to write in very simple, repetitive patterns, to which he adds layer upon layer of instrumentation and counter-melodies. So encountering his band members while journeying down the stairs actually acts as a visual representation of his songwriting style.

But there is something more happening here, an impression which only grew as I saw each new video in the series. Is the band actually there, or is this the music Zach Condon hears in his head as he moves through life? This visionary motif is reinforced by a simple device in nearly every video: they begin with Condon walking in to a place (a bar, a park, even an ice cream truck garage) and “discovering” this band already in place, joining in the song he’s already singing to himself. And at the end of nearly every one, Zach walks out alone, leaving the band in its place.

The YouTube version actually cuts off the brief introduction, which I think is unfortunate. It has Condon standing on the roof of the abandoned factory (the stairwell in “Nantes). He raises a conch shell to his lips and sounds a call to arms (“Call to Arms” is the title of the 16-second intro on the album). The call to his fantasy-world band to assemble?

We are in the dreamscape of the artist. It’s our world–at least it looks like our world–but the artist sees things that aren’t there (or are they?), and then helps us to see them.

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